Salmon: Why the Irrelevance of Davos Is Good News

It's a sign that the economic crisis is over, at least if you're a member of the 0.01%.

NEW YORK (Reuters Blogs) -- No crisis can last forever, and the main lesson I'm taking from the 2014 World Economic Forum is that, at least as far as the world's elite are concerned, we've finally put the financial crisis behind us. There are still a lot of things to worry about, of course, both political and economic. But this was by far the least economically interesting Economic Forum I've been to.

Now admittedly I've been coming to this conference during extremely interesting times. My first WEF was in 2008, when the credit crisis was top of mind; in all of the conferences since then, the unquestioned center of the proceedings has been the various conversations -- formal and informal, public and private -- between all the financial-sector bigwigs who attend. Finance ministers, central bank governors, bank CEOs -- this was their conference, and it was important because they controlled the levers at the heart of all the world's major economies.

Last year, I got a brief glimpse behind the curtain when I made it into an invitation-only discussion of monetary policy. The intellectual firepower in the room was absolutely astonishing: great central bankers of the past and present; Nobel laureates in economics; policymakers with decades of deep immersion in the issues at hand. The level of discussion was unremittingly high, and it was clear that everybody in the room was getting real value out of it.

This year, by contrast, economic issues were pretty much an afterthought. Sure, the central bankers and finance ministers all still turned up, and had the meetings they always have. But no one seemed to care. There was dutiful discussion of tapering, for instance, but it was clear that no one's heart was really in it.